After a good deal of development and preparation, Yahoo are nearing the release of their new look front page. The hugely interactive portal is being mooted as a competitor to the already popular iGoogle interface. With the combination of Yahoo’s email and news superiority, execs within the company will no doubt be hoping that they can capitalise on their successes to boost their flagging search.
With the current page blotted by unpopular Yahoo services, noises from within the company appear to suggest that these will be a thing of the past. In an interview covered by The Telegraph, Senior Vice President Tpan Bhat even went as far to say – “Every pixel on the page is relevant now. We have taken out a lot of our own stuff that was creating a dead zone for our users”; a sentiment few would argue with.
The new and improved user-friendly Yahoo will also be able to pull in sources from popular news sites and even feature integration with social media hotshots Twitter and Facebook. Undoubtedly their current site still receives a great deal of traffic; however, with the added incentive of having everything you need on one simple hub site, this could well prove to be a major turning point in the fortunes of what once was the world’s most popular search engine.
The BBC offer a full report, including the comments of chief executive officer Carol Bartz if you’d like to know more. However, currently there isn’t a date penned in for the release here in the UK, although a tentative statement suggests it will be within ‘the next few weeks’.
It will be interesting to see how the new front page affects Yahoo’s search capacity; particularly if they also complete the integration with Microsoft Bing (depending on what extent this is done of course), which is still provides a better engine with superior SERPs. With Google Wave also on the imminent horizon, will this also help Yahoo stay relevant and allow it to start clawing back some of Google’s lead?
One thing is for sure though, this has been one of if not the most productive and progressive periods in the history of search engines. Yahoo and Microsoft are finally taking the fight to Google, which can only be good for the quality of the service each provides.
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